William Bowen's Corporate Social Responsibility In Business

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Introduction The phrase CSR was introduced by William J. Bowen in 1953. Bowen is considered as the father of the term CSR. However, CSR found its root as an important concept and a key strategy in business during decade of 1990s and afterward in the course of more global socio-economic scenario and more competing corporations of the world. Corporate social responsibility is also referred as corporate conscience, corporate citizenship, social performance, sustainable responsible business/responsible business and so on by scholars and business leaders. CSR is basically a concept whereby companies decide voluntarily to contribute to a better society and a cleaner environment. CSR is a process with the aim to embrace responsibility for the company’s…show more content…
There are no universally agreed-upon definitions of the term “corporate citizenship” and “corporate social responsibility”. The nature and scope of corporate social responsibility has changed over time. CSR has been fetching more and more interest worldwide over recent years. The history of CSR is almost as long as that of firms. Concerns about the excesses of the East India Firm were commonly expressed in the seventeenth century. There has been a tradition of benevolent capitalism in the UK for over 150 years, for example, Quaker families such as the Hersheys, Rowntrees, Cadburys who sought to improve their employees’ standard of living as well as enhancing the communities in which they lived (John,…show more content…
Business leaders helped get schools and universities built and made financial contributions over and above their taxes to support infrastructure projects, museums, sports, and recreation facilities. Great cities like Manchester, Bombay, New York, and Sydney were given many of their public assets such as libraries and concert halls by the business leaders of the time (Marcus, Oconnor, 2005). These business leaders such as, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Welcome went on to endow great foundations to carry on the community work that they saw as their “social responsibility” or good citizenship and established a new level in corporate charitable behavior (John Hancock, 2005). Two antonymous motives seems to be the basis of this tradition. First, the ethical imperative ‘often articulated by religious groups’ was that those who are wealthy and powerful should help those who are not, and so wealthy industrialists were expected of charitableness and generosity. Second, the factor of social investment by which long term benefits would be gained by the business from having first-class schools, technical institutes, and universities in their cities. For instance, business leaders had started many of the prominent U.S. business schools that still receive a substantial support from firms. However, these 19th century’s contributions to
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